Chapter 11: S1E3: The Man Who Refuses Illusions
The silence in Ragnak’s hotel room had been total, a vacuum where the rustle of six papers had screamed. The next morning, the summons came not as a group text, but as individual, precise directives. A location. A time. No pretext.
Gideon Prasetya received his at 6:47 AM, as he finished his morning routine of push-ups and planks on his hotel room floor. The phone buzzed once. Jakarta Cathedral. South Steps. 9:00. He read it, his breathing even, his face impassive. He felt no surprise, only a familiar tightening in his gut—the pre-shift sensation of entering the compound walls, of assuming the mantle of control. He dressed in simple, dark trousers and a neutral polo shirt, the civilian uniform of a man who is never quite off-duty.
The morning was already thick, a damp heat pressing down on Central Jakarta. The cathedral rose like a bleached bone against the hazy sky, its neo-gothic spires a stark, incongruous testament to faith amidst the soaring glass and steel of the capital’s financial district. The traffic on Jalan Katedral was its own profane hymn of horns and engine growls.
Gideon waited on the designated steps, his back straight, hands loosely at his sides. He watched the people: early-morning tourists with wide-brimmed hats, a old woman slowly climbing the steps to pray, a security guard leaning against a pillar, smoking. He categorized them automatically. No threats. Just components of the daily system, some functioning smoothly, others showing wear.
Ragnak arrived without sound. One moment Gideon was alone on the step, the next the man was there, three steps below him, looking up. He wore a light grey linen shirt that seemed to absorb the shadows of the arched portico. His presence didn’t startle; it simply altered the atmosphere, like a drop in pressure.
“Walk with me,” Ragnak said. It wasn’t a request.
They moved away from the main entrance, around the side of the vast building where a quieter courtyard opened up, lined with benches and faded floral offerings. The din of the street faded to a murmur. Here, the air smelled of old stone, damp earth, and the faint, clingy sweetness of frangipani.
Ragnak stopped beside a weathered statue of a saint, the features smoothed by rain and time. He did not look at Gideon. He looked at the stone.
“Your submission was anomalous,” Ragnak began, his voice as dry as the pages of a closed ledger. “You left two categories blank. You populated the third with multiple entries. Explain the deviation.”
Gideon had expected this. The analysis. He felt no need to prevaricate. Truth was a tool, and he wielded it without flourish. “It wasn’t a deviation. It was the only correct response to an flawed premise.”
Ragnak’s head tilted a fraction, a neurologist observing a reflex. “The premise was interpersonal evaluation.”
“And I evaluated,” Gideon said. He crossed his arms, not defensively, but as if bracing a door. “The categories of ‘kiss’ and ‘marry’ are emotional constructs. They deal in preference, attraction, personal compatibility. They are subjective noise. In a scenario requiring operational selection—which is what I assume this process is—such emotions are contaminants. They impair judgment. To engage with them would have been to endorse a faulty framework.”
A breeze stirred the heavy leaves above them. Somewhere, a bell tolled once, a flat, lonely sound.
“So you rejected the framework,” Ragnak stated.
“I operated within its only useful parameter,” Gideon corrected. “‘Kill’ is not emotional. It is strategic. Terminal. It is the removal of a failing or threatening component from a system to preserve the integrity of the whole. It is the ultimate act of responsibility.”
(10 DAYS UNTIL RAGNAK'S DECISION).
On the quiet steps of Jakarta Cathedral, Gideon faced Ragnak without fear as he explained his brutal honesty. He left “kiss” and “marry” empty because emotions have no place in judgment. Instead, he wrote three names under “kill” — Ridwan, Vera, Johan — not from hatred, but because they threaten stability through charm, influence, and chaos. No malice. Just logic. Responsibility sharpened into a weapon… and fate listens carefully.
“Ridwan,” Gideon continued, his gaze fixed on middle distance, on the high wall separating the holy ground from the rushing city. “He constructs reality. He makes people feel at ease, seen, agreeable. In a prison, he’s the inmate who brokers deals in the yard, who smiles at the guards while running contraband. You can’t trust the facade because there’s nothing solid behind it. He’d compromise any principle for harmony. He is a solvent to order. In a critical situation, he would negotiate with the threat if it meant a peaceful outcome. That makes him the most dangerous.”
A pair of nuns walked past, their habits whispering against the paving stones. Neither man acknowledged them.
“Vera,” Gideon said. “She hoards connections. She sees people as nodes in a network. Knowledge is her currency, and she trades it without loyalty to anything but her own understanding of the bigger picture. She wouldn’t betray out of spite, but out of calculated necessity. You could never be sure if your secrets were yours, or if they were assets in her portfolio. An organization built on classified information, on clear chains of command, cannot tolerate a sovereign intelligence operating within it. She is a latent system failure.”
He uncrossed his arms, his hands forming loose fists at his sides. The final name came out with a hint of distilled exasperation, the closest he ever came to contempt.
“Johan. He is impulse personified. He acts on feeling, on the thrill of the moment. He sees rules as obstacles to be streamed for entertainment. In a controlled environment, that unpredictability is a spark in a room full of oxygen. He would act without considering consequence, without regard for collateral damage, because for him, it’s all a game with a reset button. He cannot be relied upon. He is chaos.”
Gideon finally turned his head to look at Ragnak. His eyes were flat, clear. “It was an assessment of threat level and reliability. Not personal. If you asked me to choose three to save in a crisis, the list would be different. Sinta. Inyo. Possibly you. But you didn’t ask that. You asked for removal. So I provided the logical choices.”
The saint’s empty stone eyes stared past them. The cathedral loomed, a monument to a mercy that had no place in this conversation.
Ragnak absorbed it all, his expression unchanging. The clinical recitation of flaws, the utter absence of personal animus—it was a cleaner analysis than his own. It was beautiful in its sterility.
“And the others?” Ragnak asked. “Sinta. Inyo.”
“Judge Sinta operates on a fixed code. It may be rigid, but it is knowable, consistent. You can build a structure around that. Inyo seeks to heal. In a high-stress system, that function reduces attrition, preserves functionality. Both are assets, if managed. Their weaknesses are passive. The weaknesses of the three I named are active, aggressive. They don’t just fail; they cause failure in others.”
For the first time, Ragnak showed a flicker of something—not agreement, but recognition. He saw in Gideon a pure, unadulterated expression of the very principle Arkan embodied: order above all. Here was a man who had willingly become a component of a carceral system, who believed walls and rules were forms of love because they protected society from its own rot. He had internalized the algorithm of control.
“You believe emotion is a flaw,” Ragnak stated.
“It is a variable that cannot be quantified or controlled,” Gideon replied. “It leads to hesitation, to irrational sacrifice, to compromised outcomes. You cannot be responsible for others if you are governed by it. My duty is to the integrity of the system that protects the many. That requires removing compromised elements. It’s simple mathematics.”
Simple mathematics. Ragnak’s mind, a palace of cold logic, echoed the sentiment. This was what remained when you stripped away the memory of a sister’s laugh, the warmth of a healing touch. This was the end product. He and Gideon were reflections in a distorted mirror: one born of trauma and surgical precision, the other forged in the relentless daily grind of institutional enforcement.
“Your clarity is noted,” Ragnak said, his tone giving nothing away.
“Is that all?” Gideon asked, not relieved, not anxious. Just ready for the next task.
“For now.”
Gideon gave a single, short nod. He didn’t ask for feedback, didn’t seek validation. He had rendered his report. His job here was done. He turned and walked back the way he came, his stride measured and sure, disappearing around the corner of the cathedral without a backward glance. A man returning to his post.
Ragnak remained by the silent saint. He replayed Gideon’s words. No malice. Just logic. The weapon was self-sharpening, self-justifying. It required no external hand to guide its strike. It was, perhaps, the perfect instrument.
And yet.
A flaw, so minute it was almost theoretical, presented itself. Gideon’s system was predicated on a single, unshakeable belief: that his judgment of what threatened the system was infallible. That his code was the absolute truth. It was a dogma. And dogma, by its very nature, was blind to the thing it could not compute.
Ragnak looked up at the cathedral’s spire, piercing the humid sky. A place of faith. Gideon had his own religion, one of order and removal. He had just confessed its tenets.
Fate, or the thing that served its function, had listened carefully. It had heard the conviction, the purity of purpose.
It had also heard the brittle sound of an ideal that had never once been broken.
=====
It had also heard the brittle sound of an ideal that had never once been broken. The judgment on Gideon was suspended. The blade moved to its next subject.
Sinta Hartono’s directive specified 7:00 PM at the outer gardens of Istana Merdeka, the presidential palace. She arrived precisely at 6:50, a habit born of never wanting to be rushed into a space she hadn’t first assessed. The palace was a colossal, glowing silhouette against the indigo evening, its white columns and neoclassical façade lit with a stark, solemn grandeur. This was a place of decisions, of sealed fates and official portraits. It suited her.
She stood not on the main lawn where tourists milled during the day, but on a quieter gravel path lined with manicured pulai trees, their shapes precise and shadowed. The air here was different from the cathedral’s—less haunted, more impregnable. It smelled of cut grass, expensive fertilizer, and the faint, clean scent of water from hidden sprinklers.
Ragnak found her there, observing a peacock that strutted negligently across the path, its tail feathers dragging like a dismissed courtier’s robe. She didn’t turn as he approached, but her posture infinitesimally stiffened. Acknowledgement.
“You requested an explanation,” she stated, preempting him. Her voice was cool, courtroom-even. She finally looked at him, the palace lights catching in her glasses. “My submission was also atypical. No ‘marry.’ You want to know if it was a rejection of the exercise, like Gideon’s.”
“It was not,” Ragnak said. It wasn’t a question.
(10 DAYS UNTIL RAGNAK'S DECISION).
“No,” Sinta confirmed. She turned fully to face him, clasping her hands in front of her. A professional stance. “Gideon rejected the premise. I engaged with it fully. I simply found the category of ‘marry’ irrelevant to the underlying question.”
A police patrol glided silently past the high, wrought-iron fence, its lights off. The peacock uttered a harsh, lonely cry.
“The exercise forces a triage of human connection,” she continued, her gaze now on the illuminated palace windows. “Kiss. A brief, contingent alliance. Physical or tactical. Marry. A permanent fusion, total integration of resources and fates. Kill. The termination of influence. In a controlled, high-stakes environment—which this is clearly becoming—the middle option is a fantasy. It’s a vulnerability.”
She adjusted her glasses. “You don’t marry on a battlefield. You form temporary compacts with reliable allies. You neutralize active threats. To even consider ‘marry’ would be to entertain a dangerous delusion of safety. I don’t deal in delusions.”
“Your kiss was Gideon.” Ragnak watched the peacock disappear into a dark hedge.
“Respect,” Sinta said, the word clipped. “Not affection. A kiss, in this context, is an acknowledgement of aligned purpose. A momentary parity. He is rigid, but his rigidity is structural. It has weight. You can build on it, or at least beside it. In a crisis, that reliability has value. It’s a gesture of professional recognition, nothing more.”
The night breeze carried the distant scent of cloves from a passing kretek smoker. It felt illicit here, in this sanitized air.
“And your kill.” Ragnak let the word hang.
Sinta was silent for a long moment. A complex series of micro-expressions flitted across her face—not guilt, but the strain of fitting a messy truth into a clean verdict. “Ridwan,” she said finally.
The name fell between them like a stone.
“You fear him.”
“I comprehend him,” she corrected, a sharp edge entering her tone. “And what I comprehend is chaos wrapped in a smile. He’s not evil. He’s… ambient noise given a charming shape. He tells people what they need to hear to make a moment feel perfect. He sells the fantasy of seamless connection.”
She began to walk slowly along the gravel path, her low heels crunching. Ragnak fell into step beside her, a silent escort.
“In my court, I see the aftermath of fantasy,” she said, her voice lower now. “The contracts based on smooth lies. The partnerships built on performance. The ‘perfect moments’ that mask rot. He doesn’t just create them. He believes in his own creation. That makes him immune to evidence. You cannot reason with a man whose core principle is pleasantness.”
She stopped, facing the black silhouette of the palace’s central dome. “He would look at a hard truth, a necessary, ugly decision, and his first instinct would be to reframe it, to soften it, to find the compromise that makes everyone feel better in the room while the problem festers in the walls. He is the antithesis of judgment. He is the erosion of consequence. So yes, I chose ‘kill.’ Not from hatred. From a professional fear of the chaos his kind of charm permits.”
The admission seemed to cost her something. A slight slump in her shoulders, immediately corrected.
Ragnak considered her. Gideon had diagnosed threats to a system’s order. Sinta diagnosed threats to truth itself. Both were eliminative. Both were cold. Yet her coldness had a different quality—it was born not of enforcing rules, but of witnessing, again and again, the catastrophic cost of their absence.
“You carry the scars of your decisions,” Ragnak observed, not unkindly. It was a data point.
Sinta’s lips pressed into a thin line. “Everyone in my profession does, if they’re paying attention. You learn to live with the sound of a gavel. It echoes.” She looked directly at him, her eyes searching his impassive face for something she clearly didn’t find. “You asked Gideon for an explanation. You didn’t ask him for a word. Are you asking me?”
Ragnak nodded once.
She didn’t hesitate. The word seemed to rise from a deep, drilled well within her. “Irreversible.”
It landed in the space between them, absolute and final.
“Explain.”
“Every ruling I make is irreversible,” she said, her voice gaining a grim strength. “It changes lives. It cannot be taken back. You learn to decide with that weight on your neck. It strips away dithering. It eliminates the luxury of regret. You move forward because the path behind you collapses the moment you step. That’s the only way to bear it. You become the irreversible decision.”
She held his gaze, and for a second, he saw not a judge, but a woman standing alone on a stark cliff of her own making, the wind of consequence whipping around her.
“Is that all?” she asked, mirroring Gideon’s exact phrase, but where his was functional, hers was weary.
“One more question.” Ragnak’s voice was almost soft. “If your rulings are irreversible, what do you do when you discover, later, with new evidence, that you were wrong?”
A true flinch this time. A crack in the marble. She looked away, towards the guarded palace gates, her throat working. The question was a scalpel slipped between her ribs.
“You live with it,” she whispered. Then, stronger, forging the sentence in front of him: “You endure the error. You let it shape the next decision. You don’t pretend the path can be re-walked. You just… try to make the next irreversible choice a better one.”
The confession hung in the perfumed air. It was the core of her doubt, the hidden flaw in her own jurisprudence. She believed in structure, but she knew it was sometimes wrong. And she had no answer for that except endurance.
“Thank you, Judge Sinta,” Ragnak said.
He didn’t offer analysis. He didn’t give dismissal. He simply turned and walked back down the gravel path, his figure dissolving into the layered shadows of the palace grounds.
Sinta remained, watching his departure. She felt exposed, as if she’d just testified against herself. The word ‘irreversible’ echoed in her skull, a self-imposed life sentence. The palace glowed, a monument to power that never apologized, never explained.
Decisions without return.
And somewhere in the circuitry of the night, fate listened.